We are delighted to announce the appointment of Nikki Howard to the SOA staff team as Events & Operations Manager. Nikki brings with her extensive experience in organising events for her club Moravian and also from being assistant day organiser on day 3 (Arisaig) of Scottish 6 Days last year. She will be taking on much of the work previously done by Colin Matheson who retired in 2021, including assisting clubs with access for events and working to evolve our partnerships with Forestry & Land Scotland and other organsations. As part of the operations component of the role, Nikki will work to support the ongoing development of our network of event planners, controllers and will work with clubs to coordinate the event calendar in future years.
Season’s Greetings! We know there are a number of events planned over the festive season and we are delighted to see that changes to Government guidance still permit outdoor activity and for events (under 500people) to go ahead. However we also wanted to reaffirm some of key guidance messages in place to ensure any orienteering events and activities are taking appropriate precautions to ensure they mitigate risk of the spread especially of the new, high transmissable covid variant of Omicron.
Our guidance issued 16th July still remains in place and the event risk assessments were updated in August should be used to help plan and organise events taking into considerations covid guidance. We felt it important to clarify a few areas of guidance at this time:
Minimise the number of people involved with on the day delivery of the event/activity
Indoor venues would ideally not be used for any part of the event/activity. However, we also recognise it is December in Scotland so if an indoor venue is in use it is vital that Scottish Government guidance is followed and 1m physical distancing is enforced. Further Scottish Government guidance is available at Coronavirus in Scotland – gov.scot No more than 100 people are permitted to be standing in an indoor venue so please take this into consideration.
Please ensure there is adequate hand sanitizer available at key touch points
Avoid display or provision of results at the event
Pre-registration is still a requirement of events in Scotland
We recommend no prize giving takes place to prevent crowds from gathering, even in an outdoors space.
